Subj : Retroactive Surveillance
To   : All
From : warmfuzzy
Date : Tue Apr 18 2023 19:37:14

Did you know that your Smart Phone is always on, even when you've shut it down?  Well it is, and it can allow for tracking of your location globally.  Your phone pings the cell towers every few minutes or more and is basically a person tracker.  That is why I (when I used to use cell phones) chose to use a Flip Phone that had an easily removed battery.  Currently I don't own an active phone, but that is because I didn't feel like spending $300/year on something I don't really need.  I have a house landline phone that I share with some people and I have two VOIP lines in my room so I'm not lacking a lot of capability to communicate, I just choose to have that connectivity apart from the use of cell technology.  Plus the new 5G stuff can eat away at your flesh with its ionizing radiation.  The one thing I might considering using LTE or 4G tech on is the ability to make a cell hot-spot at my mom's cottage where there is little service out there and that which is out there may be very expensive.

Retroactive Surveillance can also be what I described in a previous message about spy satellites that do blanket surveillance of a very large area that gathers terabytes of image data every day.  However, if you're the government it may seem worth it.  So once again, I'd recommend doing your spook stuff in private

Retroactive Surveillance could also apply to your online footprint.  Many ISPs record every site that you visit, though with the use of encryption they can not read what you say or things like that, they can determine what sites you visit, for how long, and at what time.  These are called meta-data, or rather the data that describes the observable data on a public or private communication.

Another type or RS, is when you use a darknet the government might interrupt your connection to the service and check out what service in the darknet has gone offline.  By such a method of selectively downing services they can figure out fairly easily if you are associated with the service that has been shut down.  I'd suggest a UPS as one of the basic things to fight against this, but they're probably doing this outage via the ISP side, in which case I do not know how to effectively counter this borking.

RetroSurv can also be used after a known operation has been conducted in a certain area.  The people doing the surveillance would get a baseline of what were the sites visited by the local population, and then figure out how those comms have changed since the new folk have arrived, and if there are several connections going to the same strange website there might be a way to mark users according to who visited and when they visited QuestionableSite.net. To conduct such a surveillance would require the use of Big Data, or massive computing, but it can be done.

Some things to think about...
Cheers!
-warmfuzzy

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